Is electricity really abundant, or about to be? I don't really see any options for plentiful energy in the future. Most people have a very negative attitude about nuclear plants, so those are a no-go. Solar/wind/hydro have relatively low output, in addition to taking a lot of land/resources and requiring very specific placement. Coal pollutes like crazy. In other countries, the electrical network already can't handle peak load, so they get occasional blackouts.
Nothing grows as fast and crazy as Photovoltaics right now. It's doubling roughly every 2 years (slightly less than 2 years). I don't know if we can scale up coal/nuclear at the same rate, but I guess that's not even possible.
So when PV prices fall to the bottom (trends indicate they will), electricity prices produced by PV will fall as well. Coal/Nuclear/etc will become unviable. What do we do then? Electricity will be basically free then.
No. What is missing is batteries. Remember, photovoltaics only work part of the day, and not every day. Same with wind.
In reality, what is happening is that because of "alternative" sources of energy, electricity is plentiful during the day, and scarce during the evening. Also, only turbines (hydro/thermo power plants) can be adjusted to keep current and voltage in the network constant, so we still need them, but because of the "green" sources, they are becoming less profitable for the operators.
TL;DR: alternative energy sources cause us to have too much electricity during the day and too little during the evening, both of which is costing us money.
At some point the turbines may have to be treated as part of the infrastructure, rather than part of the production.
If you produce energy, you get paid for it, but also pay a levy depending on how well your supply fits the demand. The levy goes to whoever fills in the gaps.
Some deregulated markets are already paying for the turbines as infrastructure.
For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at idle. The cost of actually running the turbines is covered by a separate daily auction for actual electricity production.
PV is a very long way from being free right now. Even with subsidies, it's out of most people's budget to put up solar panels, and then you have to replace them every 20 years, and pay for an inverter to use the power (inverter prices and installation costs are not coming down, rather they are going the other way).
Yes electricity is abundant, well or easily made. There is more then enough sun, rain, wind etc. to make the price stupid cheap. But we cannot STORE enough energy currently, and that's the main problem.
Liquid metal battery seems to offer some hope in this regard.
Aren't there something like a billion very poor people in the world with no continuous access to electricity? I sincerely hope that they are going to get to take advantage of local, diverse micro-generation soon, but for now I'm going to guess that they would say that while the potential (pun intended) for electricity is abundant, electricity itself is not.
Solar is low output, but it requires very little infrastructure. What we need is to make it as cheap as possible, and then cover all roofs and windows with it. Anywhere you need electricity, lay down a sheet of solar cells with a battery, and you're there.
It won't be entirely free, but with enough effort, it might get very cheap.
Perhaps we need to be smarter about how we use it. Currently electricity is used to extend daylight hours for leisure, to do work that humans used to do, in places for transport and many other things, but we could certainly be using it more efficiently.
